Rieder: The lost magic of Tina Brown

Sep. 12, 2013
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Rem Rieder is a media columnist for USA TODAY. / USA TODAY

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

I'll never forget the advice about putting out magazines I got from Tina Brown.

It was more than 20 years ago, and I had just become editor of American Journalism Review. We had an annual readers' poll, and in their infinite wisdom the AJR subscribers had decided that Vanity Fair, with Brown at the helm, was the finest magazine in the land.

I sat next to Brown at a dinner after the awards ceremony. And I was mortified as the magazine superstar leafed through the pages of the first issue of AJR I had edited. (I had barely read a magazine at the time.) But she was gentle and merciful, and said nice things about my debut.

Then she turned toward me, looked intently into my eyes and said, "Whatever you do with this magazine, make it sexy."

Making it sexy is what Tina Brown did. She was all about the buzz, and she generated plenty of it. During her stints as editor at Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker, she was the reigning queen of magazineland, a major media star.

But her post-New Yorker stints have been less auspicious. And on Wednesday, Brown announced that she was leaving her most recent project, the underachieving website The Daily Beast.

When she was at her best, Brown was about far more than buzz. There was plenty of high-end content in her iterations of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Brown had a gift for combining attention-grabbing covers, a command of the zeitgeist, celebrity coverage and serious journalism. Purists were driven to gnash their teeth and rend their garments when she took over the revered New Yorker in 1992, but she did a fine job there, giving it a more contemporary feel while preserving the gravitas.

But triumphs have been hard to come by for the buzz queen since she left that gig in 1998.

Word came Wednesday that parent company IAC, owned by media pooh-bah Barry Diller, was not going to renew her contract when it ran out in January. The story of her looming departure from The Daily Beast, which Brown has run since she and Diller launched it in 2008, was broken by BuzzFeed.

When the Beast burst onto the scene, expectations were high. Much of the narrative centered on an epic struggle between Brown and another larger-than-life figure, Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post website has been a major new-media success. It also was a template for the Beast, with its mix of rampant aggregation of everybody else's material, some original content and lots of attitude.

But the Beast never gained traction, never emerged as a true challenger to Huffington, never became an essential part of the conversation. While Brown tweeted recently about a traffic spike, the site found profits elusive. AdWeek reported that the Beast might lose as much as $12 million this year.

So what happened to Brown's Midas touch? Well, for one thing, the world changed, dramatically. In the digital era, buzz, often decidedly lowbrow, but still buzz, is pretty much everywhere. And the recipes for success at magazines and websites are decidedly different.

As for the Newsweek debacle, in fairness, there hardly was room for more than one newsweekly in the 24/7 era. But that wasn't the whole story. Samir Husni, the University of Mississippi journalism professor known as "Mr. Magazine," once told me, "She stopped giving it the intellectual stimulation magazines of that genre are in the business of giving. The magazine had no relation to its audience and market. It became a reflection of Tina Brown."

In fact, Brown has been on something of a losing streak. In 1999, after leaving The New Yorker, she launched an extensively hyped new magazine called Talk. Brown, as much a celebrity as the ones she chronicled in her publications, threw a launch party on New York's Liberty Island attended by 1,400 of her closest friends, among them, Henry Kissinger, Salman Rushdie and Madonna.

But the magazine was neither a critical nor financial success, and it lasted just three years. Quite a comedown for the prodigy who had become editor of Britain's Tatler at age 25 and later married prestigious U.K. editor Harold Evans.

In characteristic fashion, Brown put a positive spin on her departure. She's launching the humbly named Tina Brown Media Live, which will put on "summits, salons and flash debates," including the Women in the World summit she started in 2010.